by Leslie Cohen
The door, once I reached it, was my savior. It wasn’t the main exit but rather one off to the side that we’d been using all afternoon, going in and out for photographs. Once I got outside, I closed my eyes and stood there in the cold, rubbing up and down my arms with my hands, waiting for the water to work its way through my system and make me feel a little less light-headed. I texted Ben, urgently: Miss you. He didn’t reply. I had to steer my mind away from this place.
My phone remained silent and it made my insides sink. Why not I miss you too? Of course. Of course he’s not responding. He’s probably going to break up with you. He’s probably sick of your shenanigans. He’s planning his way out right now. That’s why he’s not responding. Because he’s busy planning his escape. Why did you have to go on like that earlier? About how bad the wedding was going to be? About how doomed Kate and Charlie were? Why would anyone want to be with someone who is so negative all the time? Bravo, Ben! He finally realized it! The jig is up! Good for him. Now he is going to find someone who believes that all weddings are happily-ever-afters. In Prospect Park that day, he’d realized it. We are different sorts of people. Maybe telling me then about his father was actually his way of getting me to break up with him. He is smart enough to orchestrate something like that, something that wouldn’t seem like his fault.
I stared at the phone for the next few minutes, willing Ben to call. But the phone wasn’t ringing. And Ben wasn’t disproving anything. He was just like the others. How had I trusted him to be so exceptional? I looked down the street. There was a bearded man holding court among a group of homeless people, a woman walking by them with her hands in her pockets. I tried to lose myself in the action. But I couldn’t. I was frozen. I felt like I was twenty-two again, so strong was my association between this feeling of insecurity and the Lower East Side. The streets sent me back in time. I was that lost girl again. The ground beneath me began to tremble.
And then, he found me.
“Congratulations!” he said, standing behind me. I turned around. Jesse, with a smile so cynical.
“What?” I said.
“I don’t know. I’ve just been saying that a lot tonight. It’s gotten into my head.”
I nodded and then got a chill; the hair on my arms stood up. I brushed my hands up and down my arms.
“You want this?” he said, and then gave me a look that I knew. He started to take off his jacket. I shook my head, but he handed it to me anyway.
“You look like a trophy,” he said. The dress, despite its color, was actually somewhat flattering. It was strapless, and looked like I’d lain down and raised my arms and allowed someone to wrap three-quarters of my body tightly in shiny brownish-green fabric.
“I look like a bridesmaid,” I said.
He considered me. “Yeah, well . . .” He eyed the space between my hips, like he wanted to touch the fabric. We stood there for a few seconds in silence. Seeing Jesse would not have been easy anywhere, but here, I had to remind myself that I’d grown up, that I was different now.
“I’m guessing you’re not going to tell me how you are.”
“Good guess.”
“Can I at least get a dance?” he said. I’d imagined this moment for so long. I’d seen different variations of Jesse around the city for years, people who looked just like him but weren’t quite right.
“No, thanks.” I didn’t look up.
“But you looked like you were having so much fun,” he said, getting close to me. “You really did. You looked great out there.”
“Oh . . . I doubt that.”
“And it’s another one of those Motown cover bands! How exciting is that! Almost never happens! Shocking wedding choice!”
I kept my eyes on the ground. I wanted to say, Oh, don’t be such a music snob, but I decided that that would be reverting to old habits. Instead, I smiled and nodded, decided to rely on smiles and nods, the mystery of them, without any of those dreaded words. That felt like the safest way to carry on a conversation with him.
“So what do you think of all this?” he said, after a minute or two, looking up at the synagogue. “Another one bites the dust, huh? You look great by the way.” He leaned down and whispered into my ear. “Did I say that already?”
“Thanks,” I said to the smell of whiskey, his warm breath hitting the side of my neck. I can talk to my ex-boyfriend. It isn’t cheating.
Just then, an ambulance came barreling by, the siren blaring, and Jesse instantly plugged up his ears with his fingers. He waited until it was a few blocks away, glaring at the back of it. When the noise fully faded, he explained. “I’m overly sensitive to sound . . . from being on tour.”
“Oh, how was that?” I couldn’t resist. Was it so bad to want to know? I’d been there for the beginning, the crummy gigs and perpetual self-doubt. A part of me was happy for him that it actually worked out. At one point, it had been our little project.
“It was insane. So many cities in so few days. I absolutely loved it in a certain way, but I also remember being in a place called Detroit but I had no clue where I fucking was. I always felt like I was going to die in a car accident in the middle of the night. Or that the bus was going to go off a bridge.”
“Why?”
“Just so many miles on the road.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.” He widened his eyes. “One time, the wheels caught fire.”
I paused. “Really? What happens . . . when that happens? Sorry. Car knowledge low.”
He laughed. “We had to pull over and put out the fire so that the fire didn’t reach the gas tank and explode.”
I winced. “It must have been a little bit fun though, no?”
“Yeah, of course. Being onstage is a jolt of energy like nothing else, but it’s also harder than I thought it would be. With your bandmates, you get on each other’s nerves, and you’re not always playing the music that you want to play. And the constant ringing in my ears . . . that was the part that really drove me insane. But I keep writing songs because I can’t stop writing songs, even though part of me wants to stop.”
“Well, it sounds very glamorous to me,” I said, sounding cheerful for the first time all night. “In a nonglamorous sort of way.”
“Yeah, anyway . . .” He leaned into me to say, “I hate to sound like a cliché, but do you want to get out of here?”
“I’m not leaving with you. I have a boyfriend.” I am not cheating. I am saying no to cheating.
“I know,” he said, smiling. “I have a girlfriend.”
“You don’t care though, do you?” I said, my eyes zeroing in on his.
He leaned a little backward and looked melancholy. He stood there in silence for a few seconds. “My brother killed himself,” he said.
A shiver passed through me. “What?”
“Don’t make me say it again.” He seemed genuinely sorry, like he’d said something too quickly that he hadn’t meant to say at all.
“When?”
“Two months ago.”
It was as if all my past feelings for him became present, shattering every stupid thought about how I was supposed to behave in that moment. I had an urge to reach out and pull him toward me, and I did. I no longer cared about this conversation, about what had gone on years ago, who won or lost. None of that seemed important anymore. It all just melted away in an instant. As I hugged him, a sense of longing was spreading through me. It was possible to be several people at once, as it turned out. I had different selves. Sometimes, they intersected for a brief time. Sometimes, it was peaceful. Other times, it was a bickering storm.
“You should have told me,” I said, even though it made no sense. We weren’t on friendly terms. But in that moment, I wanted to be. I wanted to go back to that time when we owed each other something.
“You never called me back,” he said, as we released each other.
“I had no idea this was what you were calling about. I thought that I was taking a stand.” We both smiled a little bit.
“I wasn’t trying to torture you. It just would have been nice to talk to you again.”
“If I had known, I would have picked up.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course.”
Our conversation was beginning to worry me. But it isn’t cheating. It isn’t cheating to talk.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Not really. Seriously, can we go somewhere right now? Just the two of us? I just want to take a break for a little while.”
“A break from what?”
“Everything.”
“I don’t think that . . . we can do that . . . anymore.”
He bowed his head down and shook it in disbelief. “It’s crazy. It’s like, I’ll be going along, living my life, and everything will be fine, and then I’ll have this flash of something that reminds me of you, and I’ll realize that I still have this vivid memory of you, and it’s like we never broke up. And then I’ll start to have random nostalgia, like about how we used to watch movies together and you used to hide behind me during the cheesy parts, like the way most people hide when there’s blood on the screen. That’s the way you reacted to, like, a cheesy line. Or how you always made me check the fire escape for murderers in the middle of the night if you heard some noise.”
“You act as if we didn’t find a person sitting out there once.”
“One time!”
“Ummm, once is enough! And you weren’t very reassuring. You’d check, but you never gave me a straight answer. You’d just say, ‘Yes, there is someone out there, actually, but I didn’t want to disturb him.’ ”
He laughed. “I had to fuck with you. I just had to.”
I put my hands on my hips. “I don’t see it that way.”
“See. I think of those things for five seconds and it’s like I have this gaping hole of missing you inside of me and I can’t do a fucking thing about it. Do you know what I mean?”
I slowly nodded. I can talk to him about anything. It is just conversation. Reminiscing. Reminiscing is not cheating.
“You do, right? Okay, good. I’m not crazy.”
“You’re not crazy.” As long as he was going out on a limb, I wasn’t going to make him stand there by himself. Especially when I did know. I did get it. It wasn’t like I thought about him all the time, but . . . every now and then.
“Look. If you won’t leave with me, that’s fine. Let’s go back inside.” As we walked back in, he snatched the back of my dress and whispered to me, “I’ve always wanted to take you to church.”
“It’s a synagogue,” I said, way too flirtatiously.
“Details.”
We started to walk through the crowd. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie standing with Kate. They looked like the top of a cake, except they seemed to be having some sort of disagreement. I couldn’t tell over what. She looked confused, wide-eyed. Eventually, they went their separate ways. The vows hadn’t miraculously solved everything. I had a blunt feeling in my stomach, a growing pit of concern, for her, for me. For all of us.
The dance floor was packed with people now, sweaty and shoeless girls, and men with their shirts unbuttoned and ties tied around their foreheads. When we were fully immersed in the crowd, Jesse took my hand and held it low, so that nobody could see, and it was as if all my nerve endings were suddenly located in my right palm. My other senses were shut down. I ordered myself to let go of his hand. I was screaming inside my head, This is not real, but I couldn’t quite pull it away from him. What am I doing? I am not cheating. A slow song came on, the melody working its magic, and his face was next to mine. It occurred to me that I felt exactly like I did before we slept together for the first time. I remember sitting across the room from him and feeling this need for him welling up, this rush of feeling that I couldn’t control. I wanted him, even though we weren’t touching, the anticipation was doing me in.
“Do you feel bad about it?” he whispered.
“About what?”
“The fact that you still think about me?”
I paused. “Sometimes. Do you?”
“Yeah. Same. Sometimes. I should feel worse.”
“I know. I should feel worse.”
“That’s the thing though. Sometimes I can be that nonchalant about it. I can say, ‘Oh, at another time, in another set of circumstances, we were together and now we’re not.’ And what can you do? I don’t believe in that one-person-for-everyone bullshit. I’ve never believed in it. The fact that I feel this way goes along with everything that I’ve ever believed about the human race. It’s all a mess. One connection doesn’t obliterate the chance of another connection. How could it? But then other times, I feel wrecked at the thought of the situation being reversed. If my girlfriend felt this way, I would want to kill the guy. I would not understand. I would not sympathize. I would not say, ‘Well, life is messy!’ I would say, ‘What’s mine is not fucking yours.’ Do you see how unbelievably hypocritical that is?”
“Yeah.”
“And at the same time, I can’t have you. I can’t really have you, not the way that I used to. And while that may be for the best, or whatever, it also really fucking hurts, you know? But I also get hurt thinking about my girlfriend, who would be pretty upset if she knew how much pain it was causing me not to be with you right now. Isn’t that fucked up?”
“If we all knew the truth, like if we all knew every little thing that went on in each other’s heads, none of us would ever speak to each other again, not even husbands and wives.”
“Oh, it would be the end of civilization as we know it.” He smiled. “I guess I should apologize to you then,” he said, leaning closer to me. “For all the dirty things I’ve thought about you.”
“It’s okay,” I said, smiling.
“No, but really. There’s been some filthy stuff.”
“Stop,” I urged him. But go on. “You’re making it worse.”
“Sorry. Sorry. But you know what, maybe she has her own . . . situations . . . that I don’t even know about. And maybe it’s like this double-blindness thing that we all do. A chosen ignorance. Is it the same for everyone? I have no idea. People never talk about this shit. It’s always the same story—the boring wife and the exciting affair, right? Like you can never love both at the same time, like it’s mutually exclusive. What happens when you really fucking love your girlfriend and you really fucking love your ex-girlfriend too? What do you do then? You just shut up about it, right? You swallow it. That’s what everyone else does. But here’s the problem with the two of us. Are you ready for it?”
“Probably not, but go ahead.” I had the impression that he was thinking something over carefully, choosing his words.
“You and I are messed up inside.”
“What’s . . . that mean?”
“It means . . . let’s say you get handed this glass with smoking-hot boiling lava in it, or something like that, and you’re allowed to hold it but you’re told that if you spill any of it, it would be really fucking bad. If nobody were watching, you and I would both tilt the glass, just slightly. We’d do everything but let it spill over. We’d come close.”
“So you’re saying that we like to play with fire?”
“I’m saying that we’re interested in the fire, or the potential for fire, and yeah, sometimes we’re going to play with it. Not everyone is like this. And I’m not saying they’re wrong and we’re right. I’m not saying, ‘Yay us!’ It’s not necessarily good, and good for those other people who would just hold the glass as instructed and not do a fucking thing with it. Seriously. Good for them. So many people just feel shit and let it go, or they think about it for a few minutes and then it’s over. I like to look at it more, and so do you. If I didn’t come close to spilling that glass, or if I didn’t know what it was like to have hot lava all over the fucking floor, I’d have exactly zero songs to write.”
I wanted to understand how it was that he was changing the chemistry inside of me. Why were all my
old feelings coming back to me now? Talking about what made us different from other people, I felt rooted to him, with all my selves. I was like Jesse, and I didn’t want to be lonely for my whole life. Was this my only chance? My heart felt curled into his in a way that it might never be with anyone else’s. It felt a lot like safety. It felt a whole lot like safety.
He looked down, and then put his hand on the side of my dress. The people dancing on all sides of us kept us in the dark. He stayed away from what was visible to those watching. Everyone else would see a friendly moment. I kept my eyes wide-open, fighting back against every molecule inside of me that wanted to buckle under. He had a deep pull on me, the same one he’d always had. It was no different now. It was a compulsion that I couldn’t ignore, a fallibility I didn’t know I had. Suddenly, I realized that we’d been hand in hand this whole time. We could hold hands for a minute. I’d held Kate’s hand before. It isn’t necessarily romantic to hold hands. It isn’t cheating. Ben is going to leave anyway. If not now, then eventually. And what would I be left with? Nothing.
He led me across the dance floor and out of the main room and down an empty hallway. “Fast,” he said, and then pushed a door open into a dark room and slammed it shut behind me. I could hear his steps. I couldn’t see him, but I had his hand in mine, his thumb running across my palm. The darkness changed everything. It isn’t cheating to be alone in a dark room. But we were available for each other now. He began to feel for my stomach, before I could see him, when he was just an outline of his hair and face and hands. I felt suddenly his lips on mine, as he pushed me toward the opposite wall, with so many objects that I couldn’t see jangling and falling out of the way. His tongue, and all at once I remembered how it moved against mine. It was like a familiar song I hadn’t listened to in so long, but man, it sounded good. He reached for my waist, held it with both hands, and then unzipped my dress. It fell to my ankles but stayed straight up in a column surrounding me. “Take off your heels, sweetheart,” he said, like always. He used to give me gentle directions. Don’t torture me, sweetheart. Sometimes it hurts, sweetheart. I took my shoes off. He bent down to his knees and felt my strapless bra. He reached back, unhooked it, and touched my left breast with his mouth open, inches away.
